Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation

First published Fri Feb 20, 2009

Modern philosophical literature distinguishes between explanatory
reasons and justifying reasons. The former are reasons we appeal to in
attempting to explain actions and attitudes. The latter are reasons we
appeal to in attempting to justify them.

Here is Galahad sticking pins in the Paraguayan flag. Why would he be
doing that? Here's a possible explanation. Galahad has a murderous
hatred for Paraguayans. He believes they are evil and wishes to
destroy them. A well-intentioned acquaintance, seeking to render his
murderous bigotry harmless, has persuaded him to believe the
superstitious falsehood that the most efficient way to destroy
Paraguayans is to obtain a Paraguayan flag and stick pins in it. This
he is now doing.

We ask what reasons, if any, there are for Galahad to be acting as he
is? And it is natural to answer that there are no reasons for
him to be doing so. There is no story to be told to make good
normative sense of what he is doing; for what he is doing makes no
good normative sense. He is, quite evidently, engaged in a wholly
pointless activity which he mistakenly sees as an effective means to
his indefensible ends.

We might say then, that there are no reasons that
justify what Galahad is doing. We have explained it
by giving the reasons he took himself to have but this was no good as
a justification based as it was on false beliefs and crazy desires. So
we can explain Galahad's action by adducing his reasons for
doing it, the reasons that furnish his motivation, but, if we look for
reasons that would justify what he does, we can find none.

Lancelot is actively supporting a campaign to save the rainforest. He
doesn't really care about saving the rainforest as such, but he is
enamoured of Guinevere who, he believes, cares about this a great
deal. He hopes his campaigning will favourably impress her, something
he is very keen to do as he can imagine no happier state than being
her spouse. Poor Lancelot, alas, is doubly deceived. Guinevere is not
in fact even faintly impressed by such things. And marrying Guinevere,
whose character he has gravely misjudged, would in fact make him quite
miserable.

So the reasons that explain what Lancelot does, like Galahad's
reasons, fail to justify his actions. But what Lancelot does may still
be justified. For we might credibly suppose that, however little
Lancelot may care about it, saving the rainforest, or contributing to
saving it, is nonetheless worthwhile and perhaps too that the
campaign he is supporting is a potentially effective one. So there may
be excellent justifying reasons for what Lancelot does even
though these do not in any way engage him and so play no role in the
explanation of his actions.

It is natural to say, then, that there are the reasons that
explain what we do and the reasons that justify what
we do. The reasons that explain may fail to justify, as we have seen
with Galahad and Lancelot. And the reasons that justify may fail to
explain, for actions may be justified by reasons quite distinct from
those that explain them, as we have seen with Lancelot. And indeed
justifying reasons can apply to actions that are not performed at all
and for which explanatory questions consequently fail even to arise
(cf. Woods 1972, 189).

We might note, following Baier, (1958, chapter 6) that we think about
reasons in three main contexts: contexts of justification,
contexts of explanation and contexts of
deliberation. (I will be thinking here of the justification, explanation and deliberation of actions though much of what follows plausibly generalizes to
a wide range of what Scanlon (1998) calls judgement-sensitive
attitudes: “[t]he class of attitudes for which
reasons… can sensibly be asked for or offered” (1998,
4–5). A pro tanto reason to φ is a reason that
genuinely speaks in favour of φ-ing, but, while a pro
tanto reason to φ favours φ-ing, it may not do
so decisively: the overall balance of reasons may direct one
to do otherwise. The fact that smoking a cigarette is pleasurable is a
perfectly real, perfectly good justifying reason to smoke insofar as
smoking really is pleasurable. It is a reason that really does speak
in favour of smoking, even if we also believe other considerations
outweigh it so that smoking, all things considered, is not a
good idea. So even though the pleasurableness of smoking does not
suffice to justify my smoking, all things considered, it is still a
good reason for smoking. Indeed where we are concerned with justifying
reasons, the “good” of “good reason” is a
redundancy: if there is nothing good about, nothing to be said in
favour of, your (explanatory) reason for φ-ing, it wasn't a
(justifying) reason at all (Dancy 2000, 3; cf. Parfit 1984, 118).

Contexts of deliberation are essentially contexts where we look for
and evaluate candidate justifying reasons for doing or refraining from
various actions with a view to determining what to do. Our concern in
such contexts is always normative rather than explanatory but the
reasons we decide to act on in such contexts may subsequently be cited
in explanation of what we do, at least in cases where we succeed in
conforming our actions to the decisions in which our deliberation
issues.

In contexts where we are concerned with explaining an action, we ask
not what reasons there were to perform it but what were
the agent's reasons for performing it. This is often a
matter of identifying the reasons she took herself to have but here we
should be cautious. An agent's reasons may well operate below the
radar of her conscious self-knowledge. A vain person might choose to
visit a certain shop because there is a mirror there without it ever
consciously occurring to him that this is his reason. (The example is
from Smith 1994, 106.)

Of course not all explanations of action proceed by reference to an
agent's reasons at
all.[1]
Perhaps you speak angrily to me because you are
stressed and sleep-deprived. Perhaps I come home early because I have
forgotten my promise not to or laugh because of the contagious laughter
of others. Certain features of my behaviour may be explained
neuro-chemically by reference to my serotonin or testosterone levels;
to the amount of alcohol, sugar or cocaine in my system; to traits of
my character or features of my situation (Darwall 1983, 29; Dancy
2000, 5–6). But explanations of these kinds do not necessarily
compete with explanations in terms of the agent's reasons (see
Smith 1998).

Explanation in terms of the agent's reasons is plausibly
special and distinctive, moreover, in that it applies to all cases of
intentional action. For actions like those of Galahad we look in vain
for justifying reasons but it is often claimed that the
attributability of explanatory reasons is
constitutive of intentional action as such. In that case a
supposed action with no explanatory reasons just wouldn't be an
action at
all.[2]

The distinction between justifying reasons and explanatory reasons
should not be confused with the distinction between subjective
and objective reasons. The latter is a distinction between two
kinds of justifying reason, the justifying reasons that apply to my
circumstances as I, incompletely and perhaps incorrectly, understand
them (subjective reasons) and the justifying reasons that apply to my
circumstances as they actually are (objective reasons). Believing as I
do that the liquid in the bottle is water I have a subjective reason to
drink it but, as it is actually petrol, I have no objective reason.
Ignorant as I am of how thin the ice is, I have a subjective reason to
proceed with great caution. If it is in fact extremely solid and safe,
I may have no such objective reason.

The distinction between justifying and explanatory reasons is often
(notably by Frankena 1958, 44) attributed to Hutcheson (1730,
section 1). The attribution is plausibly contested by Dancy (2000,
20–21). Hutcheson distinguishes two kinds of “truth”, those
which identify some “quality” of an action that excites the
agent to perform it and those which identify some quality in the action
in virtue of which we might come to approve of it morally. (Truths of
either sort only attain the status of reasons, on Hutcheson's
view, when they speak to something in the affections or instincts of
those they are reasons for.)

Dancy also questions (2000, 21–23) whether Frankena himself in
his classic paper “Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral
Philosophy” (1958) understands the distinction he draws there
between what he calls exciting or motivating reasons
and justifying reasons, in quite the way the
explanatory/justifying distinction is now understood. Certainly
Frankena seems unhelpfully to run this distinction together with a
quite different distinction between moral and nonmoral reasons,
identifying justifying reasons with the former, exciting reasons with
the
latter.[3]

Frankena introduces the distinction (1958, 44–45) in the
course of criticizing such writers as G. C. Field, W. T. Stace, P. H.
Nowell-Smith and W. D. Falk who are all critics of
externalism. Externalism—as opposed to
internalism—has it that claims about obligations or
reasons can be taken to represent external facts. External
facts here means facts external to, in the sense of
independent of, the motivating states of those to whom the
supposed obligations or reasons apply.

For externalists, then, there are the facts about what reasons apply
to me and there are the facts about what motives drive and engage me
and these facts are quite independent of each other. For internalists,
on the other hand, facts about reasons I have are not independent of
facts about what motivates me. Internalists' arguments, Frankena
urges, trade on a confusion between exciting or motivating reasons and
justifying reasons. The former kind of reason, he concedes, cannot
secure their status as reasons independently of the agent's
motives but that does not mean that the latter kind cannot.

This concern with internalism is shared by more recent philosophers
who stress the explanatory/justifying distinction, often echoing
Frankena's charge that internalists somehow confound it.

The term “internalism” and its opposite
“externalism” crop up in many contexts meaning different
things. Some further terminological clarification is thus in order.

Sometimes externalism is understood as the claim that facts
about reasons are independent of the motivational condition of those
they are reasons for, internalism as the claim that this is
not so, that facts about our reasons are tied essentially to features
of our motivation. We might call these positions normative
existence internalism and externalism.

Sometimes “internalism” is used in a somewhat different
sense to mean that facts about moral obligation are tied
essentially to the motivational condition of those supposedly obligated
and externalism as the denial of this claim. Here we could speak of
moral existence internalism and externalism.

Sometimes, finally, “internalism” is used to denote the
claim that someone can only count as judging that some
normative claim is true if he is in a suitable motivational
condition. Again there is an analogous internalist claim for
moral judgements. These claims we could call respectively
normative and moral judgement internalism. (My
terminology here follows Darwall 1983, 54; see further the entry on
reasons for action: internal vs. external.)

It is normative existence internalism that is most often at issue in
contexts where the explanatory/justifying distinction is emphasized and
that we will be concerned with here.

Normative existence internalism has obvious appeal. If our
understanding of reason talk leaves it wholly disconnected from
anything at all in the economy of human motivation, such talk can
readily come to seem puzzling and dubiously intelligible. The classic
case for this kind of internalism in the contemporary literature is made
by Bernard Williams in his 1980 paper “Internal and External
Reasons”. Williams here distinguishes internal and
external reasons, proposing that the truth conditions of
internal reason statements be supposed essentially to involve facts
about the motivations of the agent whereas those of external reasons
should not. He then proceeds to argue that there are no external
reasons so understood.

An early critic of Williams is E. J. Bond in his book Reason and
Value (1983) where he urges, echoing Frankena's earlier
critique of internalism, that Williams' argument is undermined if
we distinguish clearly between what he calls motivating
reasons and grounding reasons. More recently Williams'
internalism is attacked by Derek Parfit who places a heavy emphasis on
a distinction between motivating reasons and
normative reasons and urges that the credibility of
internalism depends on confusing the two (Parfit 1997, 2007). For
Parfit such confusion is pervasive, found, he claims, not only in the
writings of Williams, but in those of Christine Korsgaard (1996, 1997),
David McNaughton (1988), Peter Railton (1993), J. L. Mackie (1977),
Thomas Nagel (1970), P. H. Nowell-Smith (1954), R. M. Hare (1952,
1972), and W.D. Falk (1986).

Williams' argument for internalism appeals crucially to the
supposed prior plausibility of a claim he formulates variously
thus:

If there are reasons for action, it must be that people sometimes
act for those reasons, and if they do, their reasons must figure in
some correct explanation of their action… (1980, 102)

If something can be a reason for action, then it could be
someone's reason for acting on a particular occasion, and it
would then figure in an explanation of that action. (1980, 106)

In terms of our distinction between justifying and explanatory
reasons we could capture this claim two ways:

WA. If R is a justifying reason, then it is
sometimes an explanatory reason for some agent's action.

WB. If R is a justifying reason, then it might be an
explanatory reason for some agent's action.

The bolder first version is suggested by the first quoted passage,
the more cautious second by the second. Both are clearly problematic as
they stand. The first, as it stands, is clearly false. Perhaps some
easily manufactured chemical compound reliably cures all cancers but no
one will ever discover this. Then no one will ever manufacture and
distribute this compound for that reason. But it is certainly a
reason.

The second is very plausible but extremely vague given the
slipperiness of the modal term “might”. How different am I
allowed to suppose myself in the possible worlds where R
explains my action? With no constraints on this, WB is
trivial. Williams seeks to put flesh on WB by characterizing what he
calls sound deliberative routes, the thought then being that
if R is a justifying reason for A, there is some
sound deliberative route from A's actual motivational state
to a state where he is motivated to act in a way that R would
explain. In doing so he can rely at least on a sense that the more
thoroughly remote the possible worlds we must go to to find
counterparts of ourselves motivated by certain considerations, the
more unreal the contention comes to appear that these considerations
are reasons for us. His argument thus ultimately rests on the
credibility of his sense that the internalist understanding of a
justifying reason he spells out in this way is clear and
straightforward while the rival understanding of justifying reasons as
external reasons is mysterious and opaque.

Important as the distinction is between justifying and explanatory
reasons, it would certainly be unfair to charge most contemporary
internalists with simply confounding it. More charitably and correctly,
internalists such as Williams can be read as fully appreciating the
distinction but questioning whether, if justifying reasons had as
little to do with what explains and motivates action as externalists
suppose, we could retain any real purchase on what our talk of such
reasons is even about.

Here our understanding of the significance of the
explanatory/justifying distinction intersects with vexed debates over
how talk of justifying, or as it is often now put, of normative reasons
should be understood. Here only a brief snapshot of this vexed and intricate area
of philosophy is either possible or appropriate.

Internalists seek to make sense of justifying reasons in terms of their
connection to what motivates us. For internalists, to talk of reasons
is, in effect, to talk of considerations that speak to our desires
either as they are or subject to some idealizing constraint. (Foot
1972, Harman 1975, Williams 1980, Hubin 1999, Joyce 2001, chapters 2–5,
Frankfurt 2006).

Note that this does not, by itself, imply the kind of relativism about
reasons whereby a reason applies to someone only if they have an
appropriate portfolio of desires. If the idealizing constraint is made
potent enough, there might, as neo-Kantianrationalists believe, be motivations to which there is a
sound deliberative route from any starting point (Korsgaard
1986; Smith 1994, 1995). Such reasons would be universal,
non-relative, categorical requirements of reason. (We must of course
be wary of strengthening any idealizing constraint in ways that might
render internalism trivial.)

In tying reasons to motivation, internalism naturally comports with
what are sometimes called desire-based theories of reason
(Darwall 1983, Hubin 1999, Dancy 2000, chapter 2, Heuer 2004, Schroeder
2007). Desire-based theories of reason seek to unpack claims about what
reasons one has in a naturalistic way as claims about what
considerations speak to one's desires, actual or ideal. Both
internalism and desire-based understandings of reason are often
associated, more or less loosely, with Hume and are sometimes labelled
accordingly (see e.g. Hubin 1999, Heuer 2004, Schroeder 2007) though
the term “Humean”, like the term “internalism”,
is used, even in the context of discussions of practical reason, to
refer to a somewhat bewildering variety of views.

Internalism is intimately connected with desire-based theories of
reason and plausibly entailed by them. But the two are distinct and
should not be confused: any entailment is at most one-way. This is
certainly the case when we understand internalism as the claim that a
consideration C is a reason for an agent A if and
only if it speaks to A's desires either as they are or
subject to some idealizing constraint. This seems very close to what
desire-based reasons theories say. But desire-based reasons theorists,
as such, are committed, as internalists, as such, are not, to
accepting a specific understanding of this internalist biconditional
that reads the order of determination from right to left: what speaks
to my desires determines what reasons I have and not vice versa. And
desire-based reasons theorists do not, like Korsgaard and Smith,
interpret any idealizing constraint as so potent as to free all our
reasons from any counterfactual dependence on the specifics of what we
desire.

Desire-based theories are attractive. They promise to make good
naturalistic sense of normativity and they make it a very
straightforward matter to understand why reason is of such interest
and importance to us (Hubin 1999). But to make reasons contingent on
facts about our motivation can appear to have unpalatable consequences
of its own. Notably this has been argued, for example by Parfit, to
entail that if my motivational system were unusual enough, I could
have reasons to do very odd things such as eating light bulbs; and
that if I had a motivational system to which the concerns of morality
failed to speak I might have no reason to act morally (Parfit, 2006,
354–355; see also Quinn, 1993; Mele 2003, 79; Heuer 2004,
49–53; and Parfit On What Matters—see Other
Internet Resources).

Others, nonreductive realists about reasons (Scanlon 1998;
Dancy 2000; Parfit 2007; Parfit On What Matters—see
Other Internet Resources), reject any view that seeks to unpack
normative reason talk in terms of what does—or what might
—engage our wills. We know what reasons are, such writers think,
but there is little to be said by way of illuminating analysis or
other philosophical explication. (See e.g. Parfit 2006,
330–331.) Thus Scanlon opens What We Owe to Each Other
with this passage:

I will take the idea of a reason as primitive. Any attempt to explain
what it is to be a reason for something seems to me to lead back to
the same idea: a consideration that counts in favour of it.
“Counts in favour how?” one might ask. “By providing
a reason for it” seems to be the only answer. (1998,
17)

Then there is expressivism, a view distinct from both
internalism and nonreductive realism. Expressivists seek to understand
normative language in terms of the motivating states, desires,
intentions etc. of those who use such language but as
expressive and not descriptive of such states
(Blackburn 1998, Gibbard 1990, 2003).

In general, the core idea of expressivism about some concept
Fness is that the best philosophical explication of
Fness consists not in some analytic account of what
Fness is but in an account of what it is to call
something F or to think something F. We
then understand what thought is being expressed when something is
called F. With straightforward descriptive concepts things
are otherwise: I first understand what it is to be spherical and that
understanding informs my understanding of what it is to call something
spherical or to think it is spherical. For concepts about which
expressivism is true, this order of understanding is reversed.

When a person calls something—call it R—a reason
for doing X, he expresses his acceptance of norms that say to
treat R as weighing in favour of doing
X.

In the light of an objection from Scanlon (1998, 58) that the
foregoing presupposes a prior understanding, of what it is to count in
favour of something, Gibbard in his later Thinking How to Live
elaborates on this earlier proposal, suggesting that to treat R as
weighing in favour of X is to plan in a certain way, a way we
can describe without using the concept of a reason. That R counts in
favour of X is then a normative thought that I might have in
deliberating; but that I count R in favour of X is a psychological
thought about the state of mind on which the expressivist's
analysis focuses, a state we might programme a robot to mimic (2003,
188–191).

Expressivists like Gibbard and Blackburn are normative
judgement internalists but not normative existence
internalists, linking normative judgements analytically as they do to
the motivations not of their subjects but of the
speakers who give them voice (Blackburn 1998, 264–266;
Gibbard 1990, 160–164). It thus makes perfect sense for me to say
you have a reason to brush your teeth regularly even if there is
nothing at all in your motivational portfolio to which such a reason
speaks.

Like desire-based reasons theorists and unlike nonreductive
realists, expressivists thus seek to render (justifying) reason talk
intelligible by explicating it with reference to desires and other
motivating states to which explanation by reference to someone's
reasons appeals. But for expressivists the connection between these
things is characterized in a very different way.

For desire-based reasons theorists, normative talk, talk about
(justifying) reasons, is effectively talk about desires, talk
the beliefs we express by which are made true, if they are true, by
facts about the desires of the people to whom we say reasons
apply. For expressivists, normative talk need not be
about desires at all but remains intimately linked to
motivation by being expressive of desires, not of beliefs. For
desire-based reasons theorists, facts about explanatory reasons, about
the reasons that do or could motivate us, function as conditions for
the truth of claims about justifying reasons. For expressivists our
talk of justifying reasons expresses the very motivating states that
may also be invoked in explaining why we do what we do when the
normative judgements we express in such talk come to motivate what we
do. For nonreductive realists justifying reasons and explanatory
reasons are connected in neither of these intimate ways.

There is, as is already clear, a lack of consistency in the
literature over the terminology that is applicable to our distinction.
Arguably talk in terms of a distinction between normative and
motivating reasons is now the dominant practice, adhered to as
it is by, inter alia, three especially influential writers on practical
reason, Michael Smith, Jonathan Dancy and, as we have seen, Parfit.
Dancy explains his preference for “normative” and
“motivating” as, firstly, in order to avoiding confusion
over the fact that talk of justifying reasons can sometimes apply to
considerations whose influence on the agent exculpates him for his
action though they fail to count in its favour and, secondly, because
normative reasons may also do explanatory work (2000, 6–7).

It's natural to think of this simply as a minor terminological
variant on talk of justifying and explanatory reasons. For many
purposes and in many contexts, this supposition is indeed safe enough.
However the normative/motivating distinction may not always sit
perfectly neatly over its justifying/explanatory counterpart. Partly
this reflects varying ways the terminology is used. Smith's
understanding of the former distinction can help us to see this.

Normative reasons Smith conceives of as truths that speak
to the issue of whether some action is justified. Motivating reasons,
on the other hand, he conceives of as psychological states of
an agent that make possible a rationalizing explanation of what an
agent does. More particularly, for Smith, motivating reasons are
understood, following Davidson (1963), as complexes of beliefs and
desires that motivate actions and that we cite in explaining them,
where the explanation in question is taken to be causal (Smith 1994,
94–98).

For Smith, motivating reasons explain our actions. I φ because I
have some belief-desire complex that motivates me to φ. But
Smith's position is subtle. Normative reasons
also play an explanatory role. Or, more precisely,
beliefs about normative reasons play such a role for people
who are practically rational. According to Smith, normative and
evaluative beliefs about what I ought to do or what it would be
desirable for me to do, cause me, insofar as I am rational, to
have relevant desires that then proceed to play their essential role in
motivation.

So, on Smith's account, here I am believing that it would be
desirable for me to φ. In virtue of having this belief, I am
brought to desire to φ. This desire of mine to φ together with
a belief that ψ-ing is a necessary means to φ-ing then
motivate me to ψ. The desire of mine to φ together
with the belief that I can φ by ψ-ing motivate my ψ-ing and
constitute my motivating reason to ψ. The belief that it would be
desirable for me to φ causes my desire to φ and
features in a rationalizing explanation of that desire but
does not motivate that desire.

Smith seeks to clarify this by comparing the cases where, on the one
hand, we explain A's coming to believe that q in
terms of his believing that p and that p
supports q; and where, on the other, we explain A's
coming to believe that q in virtue of his desiring to believe
that q. The latter case, where the rationalizing explanation
invokes A's desire, is a case of motivated belief. The former
case, where the explanation is in terms of belief alone, is a rational
process but not a case of motivation at all. Similarly the
causation of my desire to φ by my belief that φ-ing would be
desirable is a rational process but not a process of motivation. So,
where Smith is concerned, it makes sense to regard my belief that
φ-ing would be desirable as an explanatory
reason—for it does real explanatory work—but he does not
regard it as a motivating reason (1994, 177–180).

Normative and evaluative beliefs that explain why rational creatures
come to have appropriate desires do not then, for Smith, count as
motivating reasons. Not everyone would agree. Some such as Eve Garrard
and David McNaughton (1998) and Richard Norman (2001) would want to
insist that being moved to action by such normative and evaluative
beliefs, with no independent contribution from desire, should
count as motivation. The issue is made harder to adjudicate by a
certain murkiness attaching to the term “motivation”, a
point which Garrard and McNaughton vividly emphasize.

Norman agrees with Garrard and McNaughton that to believe that one
has a reason to φ is to be motivated to φ but takes this to be,
in effect, trivial, amounting to a “redundancy theory” of
motivation whereby the content of

X is motivated to φ.

simply reduces to

X believes he has a reason to φ.

Of course it's true that we tend to act in accordance with our
beliefs about what we have reason to do but for Norman this is not a
phenomenon we should look to some philosophical account of motivation
to explain. Human beings tend to do this, we simply say, thereby
offering a “dispositional explanation” akin to explaining
the cherry tree's losing its leaves in autumn by observing that
that's what cherry trees do. Why human beings tend to do this,
like why cherry trees lose their leaves in the autumn, is, he urges, a
matter for the empirical sciences, not a philosophical theory of
motivation.

For Smith, as we have seen, normative and motivating reasons are
entirely distinct, categorically different sorts of things: normative
reasons are truths, while motivating reasons are belief-desire pairs,
psychological features of the agent (1994, 96; 2004a, 151–152).
What unites them, for Smith, is that, in different ways, they confer
intelligibility on actions (Smith 1994, 95. For sceptical comment
on this, see Dancy 1995, section I). For others, notably Dancy, this is
all quite wrong. Dancy wants to reject what he calls
psychologism: “the claim that the reasons for which we
act are psychological states of ourselves” (2000, 98).

At the heart of Dancy's case against psychologism is a strong
emphasis on the restatement and development of Williams' thesis
WB, discussed above in section 3. Dancy finds (2000, 24)
Baier's talk of “contexts” congenial, regarding
motivating reason talk and normative reason talk as talk about the
very same things in different contexts. He insists on the truth of
what Norman (2001, 5) has called Dancy's Maxim:
that “A reason must be something for which someone could have
acted, and in any case, where someone does act for that reason, the
reason contributes to the explanation of her action” (1995,
4). Similarly, Garrard and McNaughton emphasize what they call
Korsgaard's Constraint whereby “the reason why you
ought to do an action and the reason why you do it can be the
same” (1998, 48). Effectively these are both formulations of
what Ulrike Heuer, more recently, labels the identity
thesis:

By this I mean that when an agent acts for a (specific)
reason that very reason is also the explanation (or at least part of
the explanation) of why she did what she did. Normative or
justificatory and explanatory reasons are the same reasons in such a
case and not different kinds of reasons altogether….
“[I]dentity” in this sense does not imply the claim that
justificatory and explanatory reasons can never come apart. On its
current, quite restricted interpretation the identity thesis
picks out a subset of reasons which are both explanatory and
justificatory: the reasons a person acts for who is neither
weak-willed, nor mistaken about her reasons. (2004, 45)

The identity thesis, Heuer urges, is not credibly
questionable. It

leads right into the centre of our understanding of
rational agency. It explains what “acting for a reason”
means. It in fact accounts for the special importance of rationalizing
explanations. (2004, 59)

For Dancy and others, then, normative and motivating reasons are
sometimes the same. Therefore they are not, as Smith supposes,
categorically different kinds of beast. And they are to be supposed
identical in particular for agents in what we might call sound
normative shape, agents who have their facts right, correctly
gauge the normative significance of those facts and act accordingly
without derailment by any kind of weakness. Such agents act only on
good reasons so that the motivating reasons that explain their actions
are also the normative reasons that favour them.

The normative reasons that favour actions are not psychological
states but facts or truths, features of the world that speak in their
favour. (The vagueness with which I have put this gets resolved by
different writers in different ways. Sometimes normative reasons are
taken to be propositions (see, e.g., Darwall 1983,
31; Smith 1994, 95). However, Dancy (2000, 114–117)
argues that propositions are the wrong sort of thing to be normative
reasons, which should instead be identified with states of
affairs.) They can be facts of many sorts. But they are not,
Dancy and Smith would agree, features of the agent's psychology. On
rare occasions they might indeed be facts about the agent's
psychology. That the agent believes the cliff is crumbling is a reason
not to climb it as the nervousness the belief engenders increases the
likelihood of her falling off. But this is hardly the normal case
(Dancy 2000, 124). In the normal case my normative reason for
fleeing the burning building is that it is on fire—a fact
that presents a real danger to me if I stay put—and not that
I believe it is on fire—a fact which, by itself, presents no
danger to me at all. In normal cases, where my actions are justified,
the normative reasons that justify them are not features of my
psychology, not even facts about my psychology but the facts about the
world to which my psychological states, insofar as I am in sound
normative shape, respond. And if this is true of normative reasons, it
must also be true, if we accept the identity thesis, of motivating
reasons. So if normative reasons are not psychological states of the
agent or even, ordinarily, facts about psychological states of the
agent, neither are motivating reasons. So, argues Dancy, we should
reject psychologism, the claim defended by Smith and others that
motivating reasons are psychological states of the agent (2000,
especially chapters 5 and 6.).[4]

This makes a least a degree of initial sense. It is after all
extremely natural to explain the agent's fleeing the building by
reference not to his belief that there was a fire but to the fact that
there was a fire. Or, when we ask, Why does Angus punch his boss? we
naturally reply, Because he has been fired; not, Because he believes he
has been fired. It's the fact to which the belief answers, not
the belief itself, to which the explanation of such actions naturally
refers. (In discussing psychologism here I'll focus on
beliefs as Dancy and others have contested the supposed
essential role of desires as components of motivating reasons in what
they deem relatively plausible forms of psychologism. See Dancy 2000,
chapter 4; Garrard and McNaughton 1998; Norman 2001).

Smith (2004b) thinks this is readily explained in ways consistent
with his Hume-Davidson inspired story of motivating reasons as
belief-desire complexes. Believing Angus to have been fired and knowing
him to have punched his boss I explain his violent outburst with
reference to his firing. It is natural to move to the psychological
form of explanation—Angus punched his boss because he believed
he had been fired—only when there is at least some doubt in my
mind about the truth of his belief. Either I think he has not, contrary
to what he supposed, been fired at all, or I am at least unsure enough
to be unwilling to commit myself. I thus cautiously confine myself to
the relatively non-committal psychologised explanation and, in doing
so, I thereby convey to my hearers, by Gricean implicature, just such
doubtfulness concerning the correctness of Angus' belief. Where I
am free of such doubts, consequently, to offer the psychologised
explanation—because he believed he had been fired—is to
say something misleading. But that is not to say it is saying something
false.

This account of the matter allows philosophers friendly to psychologism
to explain away the great naturalness of the explanation that appeals
directly past the agent's belief to the fact which he believes,
and to explain it in a way consistent with a Smith-style Humean story
even in cases where the agent's belief is true. The biggest
headache for anti-psychologists such as Dancy however is furnished by
cases where the agent's belief is false. The fact of
Angus' being fired is naturally adduced to explain his punching
his boss in cases where he has indeed been fired. But in cases where
Angus punches his boss, believing mistakenly that he has been fired, it
seems quite wrong to say he so acts because he has been fired. In such
a case we surely must retreat to a psychologised explanation if we are
to have a credible motivating reason explanation at all.

Dancy recognizes this problem and suggests (2000, 131–133) that it
impresses us only because we are tempted to think of all sentences of
the form:

The reason why it is the case that p is that
q.

as factive, i.e., as entailing both p and q. Such
explanatory claims, he concedes, often are factive.

Caesar died because Brutus plotted his death.

can be true only if Caesar did indeed die and Brutus did indeed
plot. But in contexts where we are concerned with motivating reasons,
he urges, such sentences, sentences like:

His reason for doing it was that it would increase his
pension.

are not factive, as is illustrated by the ready intelligibility
of:

His reason for doing it was that it would increase his pension but in
fact he was quite wrong about that.

This claim would be contested however by those like Smith who take
the explanatory relation between motivating reasons and actions to be a
causal one, for as Dancy acknowledges (2000, 161),
explanations that are non-factive cannot be causal. He's happy
enough with this, rejecting as he does a causal understanding of
explanation in terms of motivating reasons (2000, 161–163). But for
those less happy, accepting his rejection of psychologism is liable to
carry costs. (For a recent defence of causalism about motivating
reasons with copious references to relevant literature see Mele 2003,
esp. chapter 2.)

We may be left unsatisfied, finding it metaphysically obscure how
invoking a putative fact that does not obtain can do explanatory work.
Here Dancy suggests, drawing on A.R. White (1972), that we may think of
the reference to what the agent believes, where his belief is false, as
what he calls an intentional-accusative. Compare the
suspicion that p. When Holmes suspects that Black did it and
Black has in fact done no such thing, it nonetheless makes sense to
speak of the thing that Holmes suspects, of what Holmes
suspects, and in so speaking we are neither speaking of some feature
of Holmes's psychology nor picking out some spooky and bizarre entity
among the constituents of the world (Dancy 2000, 147–8).

The most promising line of resistance to Dancy's case against
psychologism is perhaps one that queries his insistence on the fact
that, for a normative reason to be my reason for acting, it must be
thought of as strictly identical to my motivating reason. It
is decidedly unclear, for all Dancy and others say, why we need insist
on identity here as opposed to forms of intimacy that fall short of it.
Thus if the building being on fire is a good normative reason to flee,
I can surely be represented as fleeing for that reason in
virtue of my motivating reasons comprising, inter alia perhaps, a
belief that the building is on fire. The motivating reason here is not
identical to the normative reason but, because it is or includes a representation of
it, it surely makes plenty good sense to describe me as acting for that
reason. The rationality of an agent in sound normative shape is then a
matter of his motivating reasons conforming to and reflecting the good
normative reasons available to him. That is an intimacy that falls
short of identity but is surely, nonetheless, an intimacy adequate to
render fully credible our representation of the agent as, precisely,
rational.

Quinn, Warren, 1993, “Putting Rationality in Its Place” in his
Morality and Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
228–255.

Railton, Peter, 1993, "What the Non-Cognitivist Helps Us to See The
Naturalist Must Help Us to Explain", in John Haldane and
Crispin Wright
(eds.), Reality, Representation and Projection, New
York: O.U.P.

Scanlon, T.M., 1998, What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

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